The Last Great Storm
by Arcsaber
Summary: How Fringe would end, if I had my way. "Trigger" went over quite well, so I decided to try this one. CHAPTER 6 UP - NOW COMPLETE :
1. Snow

Olivia's eyes tried to open, but there was hearty resistance: they were glued together from sleep. She was also cold, colder than she should have been. She tried again, harder, and managed to wrench her eyelids apart. She was greeted by an empty bed, her left arm draped across nothing, and no companion arm around her shoulders. He was awake again.

She propped herself up on her elbow and squinted out of the window. It was still snowing; she was childishly glad. Brandon had explained that the closure of the Rift had caused a massive jolt in the local magnetic field, and predicted that "weather patterns in the Northeast will be FUBAR for a few days while it all calms down." _He's earning his money, that one_, she thought. She turned over to check the time and found the mains alarm clock on her bedside table resolutely dark. The power hadn't come back on yet, making the night agreeably black. She hadn't minded the two days thus far in the Stone Age. Indeed, she had barely noticed; Peter had occupied almost all of her waking hours, his grief for Walter spiking and dipping like some diseased heartbeat.

Signing, she swung the sheet and blankets off herself, spun her legs off the bed to stand, and took her robe of the hook on the back of the door. Peter's robe had already been taken. He was probably outside. She didn't bother reaching for any light switches despite the pitch darkness – she could navigate this house blindfolded by now – as she padded quietly down the stairs. Turning to her left around the foot of the stairs she glimpsed the key in the back door's lock: he was on the porch swing. She closed and tied her robe against the forthcoming cold, glancing into the front room, whose sliding doors were open. Walter's former bed, now a mere couch again. She had helped Peter fold it up yesterday, and this simple act had caused him to collapse into tears and hacking, wretched sobs. She had instinctively laced her arms around his hitching shoulders and pressed her face into the top of his head; they had cried together for half an hour. She noted the grandfather clock on her way past – it was just after four in the morning. She had, incredibly, slept for six hours.

She knew it wasn't just grief Peter was feeling, but a strange mixture of bewilderment and guilt as well. She could partly understand - for a few hellish days it had looked for all the world like Peter would have had to be the one to cast his life into that hateful, laughing Machine, but Walter had somehow snatched that honour from his grasp at the last minute, with only Peter himself knowing how. He was still amazed to be alive.

The Machine. Its name had loomed in Olivia's mind in ten-foot-high obsidian-black letters, and September's ominous sketch had swelled to the size of a billboard. Oh, it had been given a _real_ name by now – she thought Peter had called it a "false vacuum destabilizer", or some such pseudo-scientific nonsense – but to her it would always be "The Machine". Brandon had explained to the now-redundant Fringe Division's final gathering its intended purpose (it had truly been a _diabolically_ evil thing) and how it had been modified to _repair _rather than to destroy. He had whined to her that all this would probably be "classified until ten years after end of time" – he was positive there was a Nobel Prize for Physics in it somewhere. He was agreeably childish sometimes.

Olivia had let his theories and speculations wash over her, though. She had known everything she needed to know about The Machine: it had taken Walter, almost her surrogate father, and it had _wanted_ Peter, her… she didn't even have a word for what _he_ was to her. Thus, she had felt a savage, smirking pleasure when, once the operation had wound down, Broyles had ordered it strapped with "enough C-4 to put a hole in the Moon" and sent it to the bottom of Lake Reiden in roughly ten billion pieces. The lake's ice refreezing had been a nice _coup de grace_: even Mother Nature didn't want to see the thing any more. Broyles, however, was not satisfied even with this; he intended to have divers in the water to recover the larger fragments as soon as the ice melted. The proceedings had been so willfully, extravagantly _obvious_ - especially that gargantuan, scenery-gobbling sphere of purple-white light - that the place would be swarming with _the public _in short order; Broyles had always harboured a mild annoyance with _the public_, despite his fierce dedication to protecting them.

Put to the test, he had woven what Olivia thought had been a very plausible cover story: a prototype aircraft, with an "experimental magnetic propulsion system", had experienced a power surge and had crashed into the lake. It was total nonsense, of course, but there was enough meat to entice the conspiracy theorists. It explained both the cataclysmic EMP and the resulting power cuts that had stretched all the way into Maine. Broyles had said he could probably even explain the lingering snowfall if he tried, but, as he had pointed out,

"Who ever needs bad weather explaining? They'd rather just complain about it."

He had brought her something else when he had visited: a sheet of paper, hand-written due to the lack of power, granting her an indefinite leave of absence.

"I thought I'd save you the trouble of asking." They were standing at the foot of the stairs, and he glanced up. "Just take care of him."

His stoic mask had slipped here, and Olivia had squashed a wild urge to hug the man. She had settled for a chaste, glassy-eyed nod, and Broyles had looked almost pathetically grateful, retreating back out into the snow before things could get any more emotional. He, like her, had watched Peter spend a week sliding down a slope of apparently inexorable doom, and not even Broyles could pretend it hadn't bothered him. She knew he had been the last to see Peter before he had reached the Machine, and had wondered what went on between them.

"Agent Farnsworth is at your disposal," he tossed over his shoulder as he went down the porch stairs. He had phrased it dispassionately, but his meaning was clear: _Astrid is there is if you need her_. Of course she was – Peter and Olivia were her big brother and sister.

The first two days of her leave had been spent with a Peter whose emotional pendulum had swung crazily between piercing grief, zombie-like aimlessness, and the occasional laughing reminiscence.

Yesterday, for example: Astrid had come to visit, bringing pies - evidently not even the lack of electricity could stop her making them - and Olivia's heart had clenched at this oh-so-Astrid gesture. She had been strangely lost without Walter to take care of, and had obviously latched onto Peter as an alternative. Peter had been reminded by the surfeit of riches that they should empty the fridge and eat what food they could before it spoiled. They had found only an onion, an almost-empty jar of horseradish, and a four-pack of chocolate pudding pops – a Walter fridge if ever there was one. Peter had snapped one off, looked at it stupidly for a moment, and then exploded in a gale of laughter. Astrid had used them to propose a toast - "to Walter!", which Peter and Olivia echoed before they all dug in, grinning like loons. She had tasted it on his lips hours later…

Shaking her head to clear the memory, she opened the back door, softly, and found him sitting on the porch swing, his socked feet dangling. He was looking out across the garden at nothing in particular – that thousand-yard stare had been common lately – and a shiny quarter was dancing up and down the knuckles of his left hand with liquid ease. _No, not just _a_ quarter_, she realized, _that's _the_ quarter. The one from… before._

She crossed her feet and leant on the doorframe, still marveling in the fact that she could now see him without that flaring cloud of energy she had at first thought beautiful and then grown to hate. Until two days ago she had seen him encapsulated in an almost opaque fog of billowing orange-white fire, his life force being ripped away, being _stolen_, ever faster by the growing Rift. Worse still, she couldn't _not_ see it; she had been so consumed with fear and love and anger that willing the vision away had been beyond impossible. Seeing him clean and unmolested like this was as new and marvelous as seeing him clad in his glimmer had been the night she had rolled up to take him for "drinks". She could still remember, as though it were yesterday, that sickening drop from giddy teenage anticipation to thunderstruck dread as he had gone to get his coat.

"Hey," he greeted her, flatly, without turning around. So banal she felt like laughing and crying at the same time. She wanted the _old_ Peter back, the one whose throat seemed to be a magazine loaded with bullets of sarcasm, whose eyes danced with mirth and mischief. She scolded herself for thinking so selfishly.

"Hey. How do you keep getting out of bed without waking me up?"

He uttered a yap of a laugh, turning to look at her with an expression that was somehow bashful and suave at the same time.

"Something from my former life – it used to come in handy. Anyway, I obviously _did_ wake you; I'm sorry."

"Don't worry about it. I've slept on a hair trigger for a long time. Six hours is as good as a coma right about now."

It had not been his leaving the bed that had woken her up, but his absence. Like some child's favourite teddy bear, he seemed to have become her sleep talisman - the soft metronome thud of his heart, the gentle, slow rise and fall of his chest under her arm, the regular puff of warm breath that landed on the top of her head. Most of all, though, the way his hand rose to her head, apparently of its own accord, to fondle her ear, as if he were tucking a loose strand of hair behind it over and over again. She now so associated this with a flutter of pleasure that doing it herself had become almost masturbatory.

"How long have you been sitting here?"

He considered, trying to dispel that meditative semi-consciousness.

"I think the clock said one-thirty when I came down for a glass of water. I just came out here and… zoned out, I guess. Why, what time is it now?"

"Just after four."

He looked comically nonplussed. She could easily imagine that his eyes hadn't moved between then and now.

"Wow – where _was_ I?"

She had a very good idea of _exactly_ where he had been, and hoped he would be able to tell her; his final moments with Walter were obviously causing him a great deal of pain, and he was yet to share them. And there was still the mystery of how he had magically appeared, unconscious but glimmer-free and still clinging to life, a whole mile from where he had last been seen. She hadn't _dare_ question it at the time, in case somebody up there had decided it was a mistake and recanted.

She drifted over to the seat, taking his glass – the quarter inch of water he hadn't drank had frosted solid – and setting it on the ground. She sat down softly, resisting the urge to lean into him; he needed space for this. She settled for taking his right hand in her left, lacing their fingers together. He handed her the quarter, his eyebrows raised in invitation. She tucked it into the gap between her right index and middle fingers and rippled her knuckles. The coin squirted out of her hand and fell to the ground. He shook his head, rolling his eyes in a _keep practising_ expression.

"My hands are _freezing_, thank you!" she replied in mock outrage, bending down to retrieve the quarter and handing it back to him. He considered it for a moment, thinking of his father, before putting it in his robe's pocket. They sat in silence for a while, their breath painting soft clouds on the windless night air.

"It should have been me."

Amazingly, she had begun to drift off again, and this sounded a lot louder than she knew it was. It hurt her heart to hear it, but she could think of no reply, so she stayed silent. September's words to her in the lab a few days before came back to her, as momentous as if they had been delivered through a loudhailer: _Bishop must die – we can see no other resolution_. Peter hadn't been there to hear it – he had just been taken to the hospital in New York - but she and Walter had. Walter had all but broken in half with impotent grief, but she had reacted very differently, wanting to strangle the bald bastard, to hit him, _smite_ him, wipe that glacial indifference off his face. He had seemed to be addressing only Walter, enunciating carefully as if he wanted to hurt the old man as much as possible.

Walter had disappeared soon after, and she was sure had finally descended all the way into the gaping jaws of madness that had so nearly swallowed him before Peter had come back into his life. Despite the vast resources at his command, Broyles could not find him. It dismayed her that her last memory of him was that tearful resignation to fate.

"It was my being here that caused it all. He should have just let me go; there was no need for him to throw his life away."

She just about managed to keep any sign of it from escaping, but the concept struck her as both impossible and laughable. She had been caught in Walter's tornado of frantic desperation during those last few days (before September had stuck his oar in, that is), and Peter's deteriorating condition was _all_ he could see. The fact that two universes were at stake was, almost unbelievably, _incidental_ to him: his sole aim in trying to close the Rift had been to defeat the hateful, life-sapping glimmer that had been tearing his son away from him with its insatiable and indifferent greed. The idea of him allowing him to die, the boy for whom he had shattered the fragile glass between the universes and walked into the penumbra of insanity, she simply could not accept.

Another thought occurred to her, a black and shameful one: exactly what kind of "life" had Walter thrown away? She had an appalling, crushing certainty that Walter would have simply taken his own life if Peter had died.

She reached up to his face, forcibly turning it to look him dead in the eye.

"Peter, he wasn't saving a universe, or _two _universes; he was saving _you_."

He was silent as he absorbed this, turning back to stare out at the unblemished white blanket that covered the lawn. She had prodded something within him, and she knew he was now back there at the lake. Reliving it all over again. His eyes had grown glassy and distant.

Part of her wanted to push him, to ask what had gone on, but that horizon-stare told her he wasn't ready. Not quiet yet. She swung her legs up onto the bench and lowered the left side of her head into his lap, staring with him across the lawn, prepared to lie there all night if that was what it took. He didn't look down at her, but his right hand inevitably found its way to her ear, fingers caressing it with barely perceptible lightness. A shudder went all the way down to her heels and her eyes closed, the reaction beyond her control. She hoped she wouldn't fall asleep.

[_Author's note – believe it or not, the "false vacuum destabilizer" is based in fact: there is a theory that the entire universe is in an extremely unstable, finely balanced state, and that if this "false vacuum" were to collapse at any point it propagate at the speed of light, causing all matter it touched to degenerate into a lower energy state and cease to be "matter" as we know it. _

_If such a pulse were to originate anywhere on Earth, the Earth would cease to exist in just over four hundredths of a second. The wave would continue expanding forever eventually permeating the entire universe, but I think Walternate would be satisfied at the erasure of us meddlesome Earthlings, don't you? :)]_


	2. The Rift

Peter looked to his right, and saw/felt Phillip Broyles, arm in arm with him, half-carrying him across the shore into a snow-strewn patch of trees. He felt mild curiosity – he couldn't quite remember getting here, but he knew exactly where he was: Lake Reiden. Where it had all started. And where it would all end. Snowflakes were being blown into his face. They felt blessedly cool, soothing his raging fever. Sweat was _leaping_ out of his forehead and his hair was soaked with it.

The last thing he _could_ recall clearly was the bland grey ceiling of his hospital room. Between then and now he could see only a vague, shifting collage of muted pastel colours. There had been some words, but not many, and plenty of movement. Memories turned to smoke in his fist when he tried to seize them. It was like trying to remember walking home very drunk.

He looked at his carrier as if he had never seen him before in his life.

"Hey."

Broyles met his eyes, his expression one of mild amusement.

"Welcome back, Mr Bishop. I know you've lost a lot of weight lately, but do you think you could help me out here? I'm not twenty one any more."

Peter laughed, obliging Broyles by reactivating his legs, into which the feeling was slowly returning. Between Astrid's broken, defeated sorrow and Olivia's frankly terrifying rage on his behalf - she had held a gun less than an inch in front of an Observer's face at one stage - Broyles had been a rock of moderation. Being a former colonel (and thus, in Peter's mind, the highest ranking "real" soldier possible), he had the idea that Broyles had had to dispel fear a great many times in the past, and he was very, very good at it. He had said only and exactly what _needed_ to be said, no more, no less. Also, he had brought whisky – _good_ whisky – to his hospital bed on more than one occasion, and they had drunk it with that quiet companionship of the oldest of colleagues at the end of a long, hard week. He alone had accepted what had to happen, but it was clear he wasn't happy about it. Not happy at _all_.

"Are we close?" Speech was coming with surprising ease. He wanted to keep talking until he couldn't any more, now that he could again. He found the thought amusing: Broyles most definitely was _not_ a talker…

"Not far now. Perimeter's a good mile behind us."

The were weaving right and left, up and down, between the pines, the snow rendering the terrain somewhat mysterious. Peter wondered how Broyles had got him all this way on his own without breaking an ankle. Wanting to repay him, Peter unlaced his arm from Broyles's shoulder and settled for taking his right arm above the elbow. He noticed Broyles was wearing gloves, and now that the cold had returned to attack his skin, he felt a childish impulse to steal them. They walked on, Broyles guiding and steadying Peter.

They had obviously given him something, and he was sure it wasn't anything he could buy over the counter: he was far more aware, far more _there_ than he should have been. Before the world had descending into that morphing, unfocused semi-dream he could remember them

(_who? who, exactly?_)

eschewing stimulants, afraid that they would do more harm than good in the long run. _In the long run_. He laughed inwardly. If only they had known just how brief _the long run_ would turn out to be. The only people who knew about his impending doom were bound by duty not to tell, so they let his doctors play their fruitless game.

Their diagnoses had chopped and changed so many times he had lost count even before most of his cognizance had departed him. He grasped that they had finally settled on some sort of metabolic disease – he was "running hot" – and had flooded his system with calories and electrolytes in an attempt to refill the tanks that his swelling aura was greedily sucking dry. He thought it had worked to some extent; he suspected that he would have been dead days ago had it not. Olivia, dear Olivia, had raged and stormed, demanding miracles, _still_ unwilling to grasp what everybody else seemed to know: it was him, or six-and-a-half billion others. He was shamefully glad he would not see her again; doing so would hurt her very badly indeed, and he was done hurting people. Still, he thought of her at the perimeter, using her now-maximized gnarly powers to hold the Secretary's forces at bay as long as possible…

A sudden flurry of chattering gunfire and a squawk from Broyles's radio brought him back to the present. He yanked it out of his belt with undisguised impatience, and all but shouted into it

"Broyles, this better be good!" An unknown, but alarmingly boyish male voice bellowed out in response.

"Sir, we got a problem. We've lost contact with Delta grid, but last report said they were taking fire. I can't spare anyone for backup…"

He looked at Peter with an expression so close to helplessness that Peter's heart almost broke.

"Go," he said, "I think I'll be alright from here. Which way?"

Broyles looked as if he was going to argue, or assert his authority, but with supreme effort, he acquiesced.

"Should be just on the other side of that rise." He nodded to it and Peter looked around to mark it.

They stood two feet apart, neither saying anything, neither _needing_ to. The silence was more than enough. After a few moments, Broyles raised his right hand and used his left to pull its black leather glove free. He extended the bare hand, and Peter took it. They shook, and Peter could feel Broyles pouring into it everything he could never say out loud. Peter nodded as though he _had_ spoke, and Broyles nodded in reply. Their hands parted, but Broyles wasn't done. He reached behind him and drew his Glock, handing it Peter by the barrel.

"Just in case we screw up," he muttered, eyebrow raised. Peter felt his own face grin and took the pistol, stuffing into the back of his pants. "Don't hang around," he added, "those stims we gave you will start to wear off any minute now." Before removing his eyes from Peter's, he lifted the radio to his mouth and said

"Hagan, take two men with you and head for Delta. I'll meet you there, ETA ten minutes. Bring an extra rifle; I'm not armed."

With obvious and great reluctance, Broyles turned away from the man who was about to save the universe and ran, head bowed against the howling wind, into the most important firefight of his life. Peter looked after the man for a moment, then turned to face the seven-foot-high rise that stood between him and destiny.

He became aware of a sound, a very quiet, very subtle sound that seemed to bypass his ears completely and resonate with his very bones. He tried to bring his ears to bear on it, and found it both pleasant and somehow ominous. It sounded to him like a delicate blend of a wet finger being run lightly around a half-full glass of water and a constant, almost voiceless sigh of sorrow. For some reason he suddenly became knew that he was the only human being on Earth - on _either_ Earth – who would be able to hear it: it was calling to him, and him alone. Knowing he was about to see its source, he climbed the last incline and stood at the top.

He was looking at a completely incomprehensible spectacle, and he could feel his mind poking and prodding and kneading it in an attempt to force it into his range of perception. It was a roughly hemispherical capsule of wavering space about fifty yards across. It admitted a view of its contents, but they were shifting and twisting and fracturing and reforming before his eyes. It was like looking into the centre of some enormous, multifaceted diamond that was being rotated with ponderous slowness. The Rift's surface was not perfectly smooth; it wobbled and rippled slightly as though being viewed through a heat haze. It also imbued the interior with a ghastly bluish-white tint. He knew that the contents were in both universe and in neither: this watery envelope was the beginnings of his birth universe's intrusion into, and displacement of, this one. His _home_ one. He imagined a film, of a paperweight being thrown into a pane of glass, slowed down thousands of times. This… _thing_ was the paperweight, and this _universe_ was the glass, and if this didn't work, the entire pane would be destroyed. Game over.

The gunfire resumed, greatly intensified. He knew Broyles had joined the party, which meant he had been standing here, slack-jawed and gaping, for at least eight minutes. Without taking his eyes from that lazily turning jewel, he began to descend the decline, his newly-resharpened faculties being bombarded with sheer input. He could feel every snowflake hit his skin, could hear every minute shift in the wind's strength and direction. The gunshots sounded as clear as if they had been coming from the Glock he had just been given.

The snow was becoming deeper as he reached level ground again, and it climbed halfway up his shins as he reached the bottom. The air falling into his lungs felt incredibly enervating, and he chuckled inwardly at the irony - it was as if the universe was making absolutely sure he would live just long enough to complete his mission. His eyes still nailed to that mushroom-cap abomination, his foot struck something under the snow and he toppled forwards, arms splayed, into a stream. Only his top half landed in the water, but he felt his chest and stomach assailed by a thousand, a _million_ sword points of diabolical coldness. He wrenched himself out of the water and thudded backwards into the snow, the wind knocked out of him. Absurdly, he heard Walter in his head – _get out of that shirt, Peter, or you'll freeze!_ Again he laughed inside - freezing, he reflected, would have been quite the best thing that could have happened to him this night. Even though it was ridiculous, he yanked the wet shirt over his shoulders and head and left it behind. He had caught his breath, so he stood again and walked on.

As he closed on the rift, no more than twenty yards away now, a strange and paradoxical pair of feelings arose. Bodily, he felt himself being tugged gently by questing hands of weariness, trying to pull him down into a pleasant daze. He felt as though he were wearing a knapsack in which with each step forward half a brick was materializing; the stimulants had apparently decided they could do nothing more for him and had beat a hasty retreat. The exact opposite was true of his spirit, whose knapsack was being slowly _emptied_ of bricks. He was suddenly struck by a very disturbing notion: what he was about to do would kill him, _destroy_ him, but he would be utterly without a care by that time. He doubted if he would even notice. The fear he had been anticipating ever since he had regained full consciousness in Broyles's arms simply hadn't materialized.

His snow-impaired walk became first a stagger, then a lurch, and finally the tottering weave of a baby that had only just acquired the skill. He had reached the Rift, its swimming, rippling surface less than six inches in front of his nose. Taking a steadying breath, he went inside.

The boundary had no thickness that he could discern – one moment he was outside, and then he was in – but the first breath he pulled in once inside told him he didn't have long. Not long at all. That air was almost useless. In every direction he looked he saw a kaleidoscopically-distorted frozen lake and its surrounding trees, but he was unsure _which _lake. He decided it was probably both or either. From the inside of the dome, the outside looked _very _different. Olivia had described his glimmer, herself admitting that she had fallen short – it was a totally subjective experience – but Peter suddenly knew exactly what she had seen, for _everything_ outside the dome was glimmering. It was not fire-like at all, as he imagined his own glimmer had been for the last few days, but beautiful, as if every feature had been clothed its own gold-white, dancing aurora. On the heels of this appreciation came worry: these omnipresent glimmers meant that the inter-universal gate was creaking open all the more, and at that very moment the Other Siders were hammering their wedge in, inch by inch, to make sure it was _their_ universe that claimed this no-mans-land. Centering himself, he focused what lay at the core of this wonderful and terrible lens.

He was mildly disappointed. The Machine had soared to an almost profane height in his dreams, its pinnacle disappearing into the sky before it could be seen. Now, though, confronted with the thing in person less than a hundred feet away, he saw that September's sketch had been perfectly scaled – the thing was no taller than his and Walter's house. He examined its alloy, and thought he could detect a faint, silvery effulgence leaking out of it. He was enchanted, thinking of imprisoned moonlight, before he realized what was happening: the Machine was only one half of the whole, and it was awakening in response to its other half. Him.

He resumed his walk, but found it monumentally difficult – those gentle, tugging hands from before had transformed into merciless lead anchors. Sweat sprang out on his forehead again. He felt himself gain ten pounds with every step, and his lungs were dragging on inert air, but the Machine was drawing closer nonetheless. Sensory input began to fade, and for good this time, he knew. The previously loud and crisp gunshots had lost potency, sounding as if they were coming to him through ten feet of water. The scant colour that remained was losing saturation, and formerly distinct edges and margins were softening, blurring. He no longer felt cold, but wasn't warm either; he simply _was_. Before he knew it, he had reached the foot of the stairs that led into the Machine.

He craned his neck upward, taking it in. Two hollow, roughly conical objects were hanging roughly ten feet above the floor and four feet apart. Attached to one of them was the device the Secretary had introduced him to four years earlier. He couldn't see this, but he knew it nonetheless; he even knew it would be attached to the left one of the pair. Tilting his head down to the base he recognized the matching foot restraints attached there. Abruptly his mind flashed to September's drawing, and he saw himself splayed into those restraints. He finally felt a ripple of fear, but no more; emotions, it seemed, had also lost their keen edge. He mounted the five stairs, feeling the Machine become more potent, more _aware_ with each step. He was in the core.

Unable to stop himself, he looked straight up, into what he knew was about to seize his glimmer and use it to break him into his equivalent energy and collapse its cocoon of between-space. It was completely unassuming, looking like the top lens of a Star Trek transporter, but he knew better. The surrounding, fang-like protuberances gave the whole thing an air of malevolent menace. Very fitting. He lifted his legs, one at a time – it felt as though each foot had been replaced with a curling stone – and fit them into the jutting plinths. From here he could see, at the far end of the left hand restraint, that dull gleam of silver-grey metal. It seemed to be reaching out to him, desperate for them to join. He pushed his right arm into its corresponding tube and paused. He felt a weariness that bored down into his soul, as if he had been awake for a thousand years. His eyelids were being yanked into the ground, so he allowed them to close for the last time.

He had rehearsed this moment many times, and in none of those imaginings had he been stood here, legs and right arm splayed grotesquely, with no last feeling to comfort him, to take him through. Vaguely perplexed at this, he began to cast around for one, but found nothing useful, only that hideous _draining_ sensation caused by his proximity to the Rift. A heavy black curtain had been drawn across his mind, utterly and completely smooth, stretching to infinity in every direction. It was like looking into the oblivious eye of a black hole.

Resigned now, almost _eager _for it all to end, he tried to open his eyes – the left one complied – and inserted his left arm into its corresponding gauntlet, his palm spreading across the power supply.


	3. The Gate

Olivia had lapsed into silent tears, not knowing quite why. Peter was perfectly fine – she was using his thighs as a pillow, for God's sake – but she felt a piercing sadness nonetheless. He had been stroking her hair as he told his tale, dragging his splayed fingers through it like a comb, but he stopped, noticing her distress.

"Heeeey, hey," he soothed, "it's okay…"

She felt herself eased gently back into a sitting position, her face cupped in his hands. He used his thumbs to swipe her tears away and kissed her lips tenderly, letting her know he was still there. Looking into his eyes, she realized what had upset her.

She had spent days, weeks, railing and storming at the faceless, nameless forces that were manoeuvring them with no more pity than a chess player nudging a sacrificial pawn into its opposing queen's corridor of destruction. To think that Peter, even for the briefest moment, had accepted, _embraced_ their wishes was almost unbelievable. This was _Peter_, who, if you told him it was Monday, would tell you it was Tuesday simply to contradict you. She felt renewed hatred for those lofty grandmasters, who had stripped him not just of his life but, eventually, his _will _to live. She flashed back to that moment in the lab, holding her gun in September's face, on the knife-edge of blowing his head off so they would have to listen to no more of his pontificating. Incredibly, it was Walter who had stopped her:

"Olivia… please don't. He's my friend, and it wouldn't do any good now."

The bald man had shown no fear of the weapon, and no relief at his stay of execution. He did, however, exchange a glance with Walter, which Olivia couldn't quite attribute to gratitude; it was too… _knowing_. Thankfully, for them as well as her, the Observers had not been seen since the Rift had closed, and she all but knew she would never see them again in her lifetime…

Peter lowered his forehead onto hers, and another of those all-the-way-down shudders dribbled through her spine. His body temperature was still a bit high, but it was _pleasantly_ high; it had been like sleeping wrapped around a large, comfortably warm coal. He drew back and smiled. It was a knowing smile – what did he have in mind?

"How about an intermission? I think we both need a break."

He rose, bending to retrieve his glass – he peered curiously at the frost in the bottom – and went into the kitchen. Olivia drew her feet back onto the bench, wishing she had worn her slippers, or at least some socks. She heard industrious goings on in the kitchen – drawers and cupboards opening and closing – and reflected on how her own half of that night's experiences.

She had missed his arrival with Broyles; she was busy shoring up Alpha while they had pulled up at Gamma, which offered the flattest terrain between them and Ground Zero and put the Machine between them and the portal. The Other Siders had abandoned all caution by that point and had simply slashed a hole in the universe in an effort to prevent their recently-appropriated monstrosity from being activated. They were heedless to all efforts to convince them that it would be used to repair the existing damage and preserve both sides; the Secretary had been almost insane with fury at being crossed in his genocidal designs, and especially at the theft of his primary weapon, and had gone all-in. He had abandoned all hope of recovering the Machine and turning it back to his own uses, and had instead decided to try to manipulate the Rift directly. At that moment his scientists were bombarding, from their side (where it existed as well) it with vibrations, trying any and all possible frequencies and waveforms in their efforts to cause it expand into this universe and destroy it in favour of theirs.

A man who always covered every base, the Secretary had also planned against Peter reaching the Machine first. He felt no love for his son, who had done all in his power to reject his _home_ and his _family_; he was now a mere target, and had brought it on himself.

Thus, as the defenders had taken up their positions, a wall of wavering blueness had appeared before them, which had slowly resolved into a larger version of what Walter had used to cross over that very first time. How appropriate that it was also at the lake.

It was roughly the size of the side of a small house, and shaped like a partly-opened fan. This enormous size had been extremely lucky for the defenders: they had detected its energy signature with enough lead time to focus their attention there. It was just under a mile and a half from the Rift, whose chaotic interference had prevented the Other Siders from getting in any closer. Were it possible, Olivia knew they would have poked through into the Rift and simply cut Peter down before he got within thirty feet of his goal.

The portal had flickered and fluctuated for a long time, giving the defenders a watery, distorted glimpse of a ghostly bluish version of what lay beyond; the same thing they would have seen had the portal not been there, and yet not _quite_ the same. All too soon, though, it had stabilized, and in that instant the attack had begun.

Troops had streamed through and had immediately opened fire with their arcane, space-age weapons, having realized that they had been ambushed; they had obviously been expected a somewhat unimpeded entrance. The defenders, a roughly three hundred-strong motley crew of FBI agents, police and armed forces, had returned fire, and the battle had been joined.

The defence, like the attack, had been two-pronged: the troops, and, huddled into a small niche of cobbled-together electronics, Brandon. Olivia had seen the poor boy age ten years that night. Despite his almost hysterical terror at being caught up in frontline action, he was the only one who could keep the Secretary's scientists from succeeding with their "harmonic push" for long enough to get Peter to the Machine. She had seen his hands become a flesh-coloured blur, typing with furious, manic speed in his race to keep up with the rapidly fluctuating waveforms being supplied by their opponents and sending interference back to them in a hellish electromagnetic fencing match. She had spent most of her time covering him.

It had been an extremely bloody contest from the beginning. The hole the Other Siders had been able to make was small enough to corridor their troops as they came through. The defenders had simply opened up each time a new wave appeared, and had taken just under half of each before they could even fire a shot. However, the other half _were_ getting through, and no matter how many groups were cut down, another had trudged through a few minutes later; the Secretary apparently had no regard for his soldiers, or else had imbued them with the knowledge that if they failed their whole universe would cease to exist; they were dead either way. Through sheer weight of numbers, the sides had ended up roughly equally matched, and the attackers had spread themselves into a tightening lasso around the four-mile perimeter, determined to find and retire Peter Bishop at literally any cost.

Olivia was extremely thankful for an episode of that sensory overload as she fought. Throughout Peter's illness she had endured noises she had found almost deafening but that she knew would have been inaudible to anybody else. Car horns had threatened to split her head in half, speech had reached her as though delivered through a daisy chain of loudhailers, and she had been kept awake in Peter's hospital room by what had seemed like every possible sound In the building. Heart monitors five floors away, the whooshing sweep of a janitor's broom, the crashing, waterfall sound of a coffee cup being filled from a vending machine.

Here, though, in the midst of this engagement, her heightened senses were basically keeping her alive. The enemies' movements, though appearing subtle and trained to the eye, sounded to her like children playing a game of musical chairs on a hardwood floor. She could scarcely believe how easy it was to direct her colleagues to smash their enclaves of cover. Though the enemy had superior numbers – which were still increasing – she thought the defenders would almost certainly win in the end.

Then she heard a scream, one that had been carried with perfect fidelity by the thick, cold air and reached her as though the issuing mouth had been an inch from her ear. Peter's scream. A scream of abject terror.

She felt a wrecking ball slam into her stomach, and at that point any concept of a fair fight was rendered void, though nobody yet knew it. The world ceased to exist for her. She dropped her pistol, having forgotten it even existed. All she could see was Peter, contorted into that despicable X shape. She felt corrosive hatred course through her veins, and her forehead broke out in copious sweat. The fire had returned, and this time she would make no attempt to moderate it.

All rational thought was wiped away; she became no more than a snarling beast. Without any forethought whatsoever, she turned her baleful gaze on a small group of opposing troops who were taking cover behind a tree. As she knew they would, they caught fire. Screaming hysterically, they flung themselves into the snow, rolling over and over, but this did not affect the flames the least bit. Savagely satisfied, she stormed back to the portal, where another wave of troops was exiting, this time followed by several armoured personnel carriers. The troops she slew, to a man, and they died writhing and shrieking at the foot of their heathen gate. Again with no premeditation, she raised her arm towards a fallen pine about twenty feet to her right and heaved it, with her arm and her mind, into the air. It flew thirty feet, somersaulting twice, and landed vertically into the lead APC, skewering it. Seeing the effectiveness of this, she began to hurl even heavier objects – more logs, boulders, one tree that she had pulled right out of the _ground_. The APCs crumpled like tin cans, and all the while Olivia's power grew. When the next APC came through she simply closed her fist and saw it implode. None of these actions struck her as the least bit unusual.

The troops who had already come through opened fire on her. Their bullets meant nothing, melting into harmless spatter before they get within three feet of her. A rapidly-expanding circle of melted snow was racing away from her feet, and the horrified attackers took this as their cue to leave, but the rapid outflow of sheer materiel through the portal made escape impossible.

Olivia passed into a blood-red haze of utter fury, smiting and cursing anything she didn't recognize as friendly. It was easy: everything "Other Side" was glimmering as though it had been doused with flaming rocket fuel, and she felt smirking, vengeful pleasure at realizing this illusion. Impossible, unthinkable infernos were blazing into being out of nowhere; the air was full of flying chunks of landscape that two hundred men never hope to lift. Troops perished in their dozens, their faces forever stamped with expressions of disbelieving horror at this tiny, orange-eyed blonde woman ripping the world to pieces right in front of them. She wanted to hurt, to _punish, _to set their entire universe aflame for costing her Peter.

Word spread – enemy troops, _all_ of them, were pulled back from their other fronts to engage this monster with the swirling curtain of blonde hair. Clearly panicked, they had abandoned any notion that they were engaging a _person_, and had broken out their heaviest, most devastating weaponry. Dimly, Olivia sensed grenades, rockets, the buzzing drone of minigun fire. She disregarded all of it; to her these were mere insects now.

She was holding her arms aloft, in an uncanny imitation of that X in her mind, and the sky was blotted out by a raging river of terrifying missiles. Whole trees, whole _copses _of trees, arcing down, catching fire as they fell, becoming titanic flaming arrows. Boulders the size of cars, of _houses_, thrown with no more effort than baseballs. Panes of ice the size of billiard tables, which she had unknowingly yanked right out of the surface of the lake. When one particularly stubborn APC somehow got within twenty feet of her, she simply slashed her arm across herself, diagonally upwards, and was unsurprised to see a tsunami of solid earth erupt in front of her and smash it back into the fray. She was vaguely aware that she had almost no control over what was happening, and was equally vaguely unconcerned.

She would tell Peter when they were safely back at home the next day, entwined on the couch under a duvet and nearing sleep, that she felt she could have torn the Moon out of its orbit and smashed it into that hateful doorway. She had said it fearfully, without even a hint of humour. He had half believed her.

When Brandon's panicked shout came, it floated to Olivia as though out of the mouth of a very deep well.

"Uh… uuuuuuh… I think I'm LOSIN' it!"

No sooner had the words left his mouth than a sound came from the south. All present on both sides ceased to do anything, falling to their knees with the hands clapped to their ears; Olivia was almost deafened, and ten thousand tons of Mother Nature fell right out of the air as she lost focus and swayed on her feet. The sound was appallingly ominous: a gargantuan cathedral door scraping open while the all the world's trombones and tubas blared into the gap. She wheeled around, as did every other person who was still alive and still conscious, and saw something that terrified her right out of her temporary demi-god state.

The obscuring umbrella of faceted nothingness roughly a mile and half away had begun to move. Very, very slowly, it was expanding, the ponderous speed falling just within her ability to detect. That grinding, dreamlike swelling blasted away anything resembling awareness, and when the suited, hatted bald man appeared, seemingly out of nowhere, at her right shoulder, she did not notice for several seconds.

"You can stop now, Agent Dunham," he said, very softly, but his voice still made Olivia jump almost out of her boots. She turned to see who had addressed her. It wasn't September, that much she knew, and the rest of them all looked the same to her. This one didn't have September's... humanity; she suspected that this was the very first time he had ever addressed a human being without his cloak of "cover". All he had probably done thus far was order extremely spicy food in diners, and he spoke with extreme caution, seeming to choose his words very carefully indeed.

"The Secretary's remaining people have been informed of what is about to happen. They have ceased to fight, and are being escorted back to their home; anyone remaining here after the closure will be trapped on this side. We have no way of telling those on the other side to desist in their attempt to force the Rift into your universe, but it no longer matters. Bishop will succeed before they do."

She turned away from the Observer, numb with shock, and took in the portal. The enemy troops were filing back through, some arm in arm, making no attempt to fight any longer. They were leaving their dead, and carrying only what equipment they considered sacred to their universe. This was, beyond doubt, on the instructions of the Observers, nine of whom were standing at the edge of the portal in a conducting, corridor formation. She watched her opponents pass through to the last man, then turned back to the Observer on her right. He was gone. She turned back to the barrier. The other nine were gone as well.

She walked over to Brandon, who was still hammering away at his keyboard, unwilling to give in until he was beaten. She put a gentle hand on his shoulder and spoke softly, resignedly.

"Brandon… you can pack it up now. It's over."

He whipped around, looking confused for a moment, and then his face contorted into mask of disbelieving grief. _No…_

She knew two things: they had won, and Peter was gone.

She wept.

Her reverie was interrupted by Peter's opening of the back door. In one hand he held a short glass of woody-amber liquid, and over the other arm was a small blue flannel blanket. He handed her the glass, receiving a kiss in gratitude, and resumed his seat at the far end of the bench.

"What's that for?" she asked, indicated the blanket with a nod.

"Your feet. I bet they're so cold you forgot you _had_ 'em."

Now that he had said it, she suddenly _did_ remember that she had feet, and realized they _were_ cold. Freezing, in fact.

"Give 'em here."

She pivoted her legs off the bench and swung her feet into Peter's lap. He left the blanket folded and draped it over them, making sure it reached all the way to the bottom of her robe. He left his hands under it, fully aware that she enjoyed his temporary warmth, his fingers sliding idly up and down her shins.

"Thank you," she said, in a small, shy voice. He patted her shin gently. She suddenly remembered she was holding a glass of whisky. She looked into it, noting its pure, orangeless tint. This was at least twenty years old. She lowered her nose to the rim of the glass and inhaled gently. It was a very deep and complex bouquet – sherry-like, with a waft of black chocolate at the end. Her tears mostly forgotten, she took a sip, and found it to one of the best she had ever tried.

Nothing her pleasure, Peter grinned.

"Broyles brought it to the hospital on… Friday, I think. Said it was eight hundred a bottle."

The glass was halfway to her lips for another swallow, but she stopped it and gazed at it wonderingly; there was an entire day's pay in there. He laughed at her caution.

"It's okay, the bottle's practically full, and I can't have any on these meds. Broyles and I only had time for one glass before… well, before."

The mood, which had so briefly elevated into something approaching mirthful contentment, crashed to the ground and shattered like a spun-glass ornament. Olivia took a steadying sip of whisky, knowing that Peter was about to continue, and finish, his tale. She was reluctant to let him, but this needed to come out if he was ever to recover fully.

Flexing her feet into his hands, she invited him to carry on.


	4. In My Place

It was a very strange feeling. That smooth, featureless curtain of blackness in Peter's mind had begun to flutter and ripple with vague unease. He stood stock still, hardly daring to move, to _breathe_; his right eye remained closed – he was afraid to open it, lest it disrupt the fine equilibrium he sensed.

Nothing was happening.

Ten seconds elapsed. Thirty. A minute. His right eye opened, and his head swiveled back and forth. Everything was as it had been – the Rift was still there, shattering and reforming his view of the outside world. He strained his ears and heard gunfire and shouts – the Other Siders' pre-emptive assault had obviously descended into a two-sided firefight. None of this was right. The rippling in the curtain became more pronounced, became active _concern_.

Nothing was happening.

He had been expecting one of two things when his hand had finally met its metallic partner: to die immediately, unknowingly, or else to have been galvanized as if by an electric shock as the show began. Clearly, the first had not happened, and he began to grasp that the second wasn't _going_ to happen. The concern flared into fear.

Peter again took his hand out of the restraint and held it in front of his face, staring stupidly at his palm. That initial unease had now swollen grotesquely, like a dot of ink on tissue paper, and was threatening to reach a wild, scrabbling panic. His eyes, which had so recently been unable to open, were now as wide as saucers. He put his hand back into the restraint, gripped the power supply tighter, _mashed_ his hand into the thing, _willing_ it to work, slicing a set of parallel, bleeding cuts into his palm. He had cut the last of his tethers to life mere moments ago, and had come crashing back down like a sack of bricks thrown from a fifth-storey window. _Shit. SHIT! _

He uncoupled the power supply from its restraint and examined it. It looked exactly the same as it had all those years ago, sprawled out on the table as he ran his experiments. Without that same equipment he had no hope of determining what, if anything, was wrong with the thing. He hiked his feet, with great difficulty, out of their plinths and carried the device down the steps, still peering at in the hopes of seeing past its dull metallic surface and into its brain. It remained inscrutable, seeming to laugh at him, to _mock_ him.

His head whipped around, eyes comically wide, as if he expected to see help come sauntering out of the trees. Not knowing what else to do, he stepped out of the Machine's core and walked around to the electronics that had been jerry-rigged and shoehorned into the loop by himself and Brandon. Every movement was slow and agonizing – he had a mind with a very great need to act and a body that was threatening to sink to the ground, like a marionette whose strings had been cut, at any moment.

He bent and checked the waveform on the main monitor. It was very difficult – there seemed to be three keyboards and six hands – but the wiggling acid-green line perfectly matched what he was expecting: it would heal, not hurt. The muffled crackle of gunfire from the holding area flared again as if to remind him that the Other Siders still did not believe it, and that time was still running out. He checked every possible setting and configuration, begging for an anomaly, and found not a single one to be incorrect. His weariness overcame him again, seemingly twice as strong all of a sudden, and he thudded to the ground, putting his hands over his face. He knew he would never awaken from this last lapse. It was over.

_I was ready to die for this, hell, I AM ready. WHAT DO YOU WANT FROM ME?_

He pushed his palms into his eyes and sobbed, his bare lower back against the diabolical coldness of the Machine's alloy. To die while saving the universe – universes – was one thing, but to wink out here, pointlessly, in aid of nothing at all, sitting at the foot of this gibbering, leering monstrosity was quite another. He had been told many times that he was important, and this was his first and only chance to prove it. Why was he being denied?

_Why?_

A barely audible _crump_ reached his ears. The sound of a foot on snow.

His arm swung behind him with a speed that surprised he himself. The Glock Broyles had given him lanced out in front of him, and immediately began to dip and sway. The gun felt as if it weighed twenty pounds, and the muzzle wouldn't keep still; it danced in lazy, random sweeps. He thought he had caught a glimpse of something vaguely man-shaped some distance away, but his now-useless vision was also tear-blurred, and no amount of painfully effortful squinting could resolve it into something he recognized, be it friend or foe.

The gun's weight doubled, trebled, and it pulled his hand to the ground. Utterly, completely exhausted, he suddenly had the idea that all of this was taking place in his head, the Machine having blasted his sanity clean away; at that moment he might have been a drooling vegetable, his head lolling, his limbs contorted into that degrading X shape while the Machine, laughing and capering in victory, sapped the last of his life force... He lost consciousness and sank, sideways, to the ground.

xXXXXx

He felt something on his chest. Something very light, with no more force than a hummingbird's wing beat. Or a snowflake. He ignored it. He was dead, after all.

Immediately, or perhaps hours later, the sensation became more pronounced, more _insistent_ – a finger poking into his chest, two fingers, two fingers with sharp nails. Still believing himself dead, he frowned in mild perplexity. Then the perception knob was wrenched all the way to the right, and the sensation rocketed from mild annoyance to blazing agony: it felt like someone was grinding a lit cigar into the middle of his sternum. Along with this, sounds came back to him – running water, the gently pulsing wind. He was cold again. No, not merely cold; at was as though his very nerves had been pulled out and thrust into a freezing puddle. A very clear image came to him: a stooping, elderly caretaker was shuffling through the switch room in the building that was Peter Bishop and was heedlessly hiking every single breaker into the ON position. He decided to try opening his eyes, and immediately wished he hadn't - what he saw came within a hair's breadth of sending him over the brink of shrieking lunacy.

A hypodermic syringe was poking out of the middle of his breastbone, a syringe that to Peter's recently reactivated senses looked ridiculously, _cartoonishly_ large; the barrel could have gone into the middle of a roll of kitchen towels. He gaped at the thing with mounting, dreamlike horror, then remembered he had lungs and almost screamed them out of his ribcage and onto the snow. His own scream hurt his ears very badly, but _not_ screaming was simply not an option. The scream went on and on and on, and he vaguely wondered when it would be time to breathe in again. He then remembered he also had hands, and they rose in front of him to pull the thing out. It took several tries – his fingers moved with the stuttering reluctance of ancient, never-oiled hinges – but he managed to wrap his fists around the needle and yank it out. He spared it one final

(_ohmydearJesusitwasinmyHEART!_)

thought before he flung it as far as he could into the surrounding snowdrift. The scream petered out; he replaced it with ragged, panting breaths and found that the previously-useless air was now working for him again. His eyes felt as big as manhole covers, and he used them to assess the situation. He was sitting at the base of a tree, his legs straight out in front of him, about ten yards from where he had passed out. _How did I get here?_ Gunfire flared again, this time very much louder, more _relevant_. He realized what had been in the needle: adrenaline. It was the only possibly thing that could take him from death's door to this jittering, caffeine-powered Technicolour world so quickly.

"My God! Peter! Are… are you alright? Did it work? I did it exactly how he told me!"

Walter's face appeared directly in front of him, his bottom lip quivering slightly, his eyes searching Peter's face for any sign of recognition. Peter opened his mouth to speak, but instead produced a string of choked, barking coughs.

"Where's your shirt, Peter? You'll _freeze_!"

Walter stood, unbuttoned his cardigan, and draped it around Peter's shoulders. It felt blessedly warm, as if it had been held in front a fire. He resumed his hunker.

"There, that's better." As if he were addressing an eight-year-old. Incredible.

Peter was now giving serious weight to the possibility that he, Peter, had gone insane. He wondered again where his body was – had he passed out on the way to the Machine, or was it at this moment gobbling his obliging aura and doing its job of sewing the inter-universal fabric? His father's presence here, not to mention his incomprehensible _banality_, was extremely difficult to weave into any notion of sanity. Still, he realized that if he _were_ insane none of this would matter anyway. He gauged his ability to speak, and found that he could.

""Where's my shirt?" Walter, what the hell are you _doing_ here? Don't you _know_ what's about to happen?"

Unbelievably, he smiled.

"More so than you know, son."

Typical Walter Bishop. The obfuscation annoyed Peter, and he spoke again, more forcefully.

"Walter, you shouldn't _be_ here! It's _dangerous_! Are you out of your _mind?_ _Why are you here?_"

He wanted his father to turn and run, as fast and as far as possible, but his newly-recovered power of speech couldn't quite get the point across. He tried to answer his own questions, since he was sure that Walter would duck and weave, but couldn't come up with anything even resembling answers. Peter had made it abundantly clear that nobody should be inside the Rift with him when the time came – it was unclear what would happen to that space when the Rift was closed, but all had agreed that the Machine would most definitely remain – and the only reason he could conceive for Walter being here was to somehow comfort him. If so, he was throwing his life away, probably feeling guilty, and Peter couldn't, _wouldn't _let it happen.

Walter had been strangely absent during Peter's week in hospital, visiting only once and talking about nothing of consequence, evading Olivia's questions about his activities. She had spent every waking moment (and, he suspected, most of his sleeping ones) at his bedside, and she had been confounded by the fact that his father was off doing God-knew-what instead of spending what had seemed for all the world to be his son's last remaining days with him. Seeing her angry, _furious_, even, with his father had caused him great dismay – they would need each other once he was gone…

His reflection was interrupted by renewed activity from the front, now much clearer thanks to the adrenalin. First came a shout… no, a _scream_. Several screams. These were not the screams of men being quickly and cleanly removed from the midst of battle, either; they were piercing _wails_ of pure agony, as though the dying men were being

(_burned alive_)

_tortured_. On the heels of this he heard a deep, reverberating rumble that could only be heavy diesel vehicles of some kind. He wondered to which side they belonged – the portal was certainly big enough to admit tanks and the like, but not, thankfully, any aircraft. Given the suddenness and lack of lead-up, he suspected they had come through the portal, and felt a flash of worry for

(_Olivia_)

the defenders. Walter, however, seemed completely at ease, his head cocked slightly sideways in a dog-like listening pose. Noting Peter's concern, he whispered, with an almost conspiratorial nod,

"Just wait."

As if cued by Walter's voice, an entirely new and more terrifying set of sounds arose. Peter could scarcely attribute what he was hearing to anything real – it sounded as though whole _trees_ were being torn out of the ground and set aflame. He heard several booming _crunches_ that sounded an awful lot like car crashes. These new vehicles weren't getting very far, it seemed…

"Ah!" Walter exclaimed, with the air of a man who has found his car keys after a brief search. "It seems your dear Olivia has gone to work!"

As the words rolled out of his mouth those awful tree-snapping sounds doubled, quadrupled, and ignited what sounded like a nuclear war. He heard the tell-tale buzz of Gatling gun fire, more of those dreadful tortured shrieks, but mostly _BANG_ after_ BANG _after _BANG_. "_Olivia's gone to work?" What the hell is he _talking_ about?_

"Walter, you _know_ you're in danger here. You _must_ know."

The old man was immune to any warning, still hunkering with that serene expression on his face. Peter wondered what kind of drugs were currently coursing through his father's veins. Valium, probably.

"The power supply isn't playing with you, is it?"

The tangent confused him utterly, and it was several seconds before he realized what his father was talking about. As if to make himself clear, Walter produced the thing from beside him in his squatted position. Holding it face up in his right hand, he presented it to Peter as if to say "Watch!", and very slowly offered his left palm to the top. It was at least two inches away when the device leapt out of his right hand and melded to his left, the retainers clapping around the wrist in a perverse parody of a hug. He jiggled the palm/power supply combination in front of Peter's face – "See!" – before pulling the device off. It took a great deal of effort. Walter peered at the thing as if he were admiring some amusing curio, before turning to Peter with an eager smile and exclaiming

"I think it _likes_ me!"

Peter's felt his face contort into a frown of utter, uncomprehending bemusement. His eyes danced and swiveled of their own accord. This was too much to take in, water being poured into an already-overflowing jug, and a million questions were trying to climb out of his one, uncooperating mouth. He settled on one, inspired by the impossible sight of the power supply clamped around Walter's hand:

"It can't be working for you. It was designed for me. _Only_ me. There was no way to adjust it!"

Walter's face slid into something Peter simply couldn't not credit, not here, not now: for all the world, it looked like _mischief._

"Yes, Peter, that used to be the case. However, I…" He paused, and seemed to choose his next words very carefully indeed. "I… made a deal."

This cryptic pronouncement started an avalanche of further questions in Peter's mind

_How did you do it?_

_Why are you here?_

_How did you get here?_

_Why bother? It won't work anyway without a gli…_

The rest of the imagined questions, the hows and the whys, were scattered away, like chess pieces flung from a board by a petulant child's arm. An epiphany so monstrous, so _colossal_ that he couldn't even see its edges, had smashed into the centre of his head with a deafening clarion of iron bell clangs:

_**He wants to take my place**_**...**

There were several seconds of utter, uncomprehending shock, and then Peter began to moan – _no… no, no, no, no_ – his head swiveling back and forth in pathetic repudiation. He wouldn't, _couldn't_ let this happen. It was _his_ job, he was _destined_ for it, _ready_ for it. His chance to repair all the damage he had done. He felt a bolt of nausea, as if he had missed a step going downstairs, and his alertness plunged. The adrenaline shot had had been given less than five minutes ago had already begun to wear off.

Walter took his son's face in his hands and stopped its idiot jittering. He was still smiling, but it had turned into a fragile smile of exasperated patience.

"Peter, please, for once, see this from my perspective. What I did was wrong, I have always known that, but I did it out of _love_. Seeing you die the first time…"

The smile fell away; he began to cry, and Peter felt his own heart break.

"Seeing you die the first time was bad enough, but seeing you do it again through that blasted window, being powerless to do anything about it…" His mouth turned down in a rictus of perfect misery, and he trailed off into thick sobs. His consciousness beginning to turn soupy again, Peter wrapped his hand around his father's wrist to steady him.

"Watching you go into that thing," he indicated the Machine with a tilt of his head, "and pay for my mistake… I can't do it. It would be the end of me."

Walter's desperate, beseeching honesty penetrated Peter's brain-fog with the ease of a laser beam: the man was almost hysterical at the thought of his son casting his own life away, and Peter suddenly knew that if he had done so, his father _would_ have died, broken and truly insane, a very short time later.

His eyes had not left Peter's all this time. He lowered his forehead until it was touching his son's, tears flowing freely now. Peter managed to speak, the words thick with his own imminent tears, his head shaking again.

"No… no, I can't let you…"

Walter chuckled through his tears and tried to smile.

"Come on, what's the use in a crazy old codger like me plodding along through the twilight in favour of a vital young buck like you?"

It was just like Walter to try something like this and incredibly, despite the furious, raging denial coursing through him, Peter laughed.

They sat in silence for a while, simply looking each other in the eyes. Peter was still trying to mount some kind of case against his father's intentions, _anything_ to keep him from going into that thing. He opened his mouth, still not quite sure of what he would say, when Walter's next utterance destroyed everything in his mind except for moaning, impotent grief.

"Peter... if you go, I have nothing left. It would _tear_ my heart out. You are the _only_ reason I live. You always were."

In that moment Peter knew, finally knew, what had to happen. The realization hit him in the belly with the force of a prizefighter's body blow, and he crumpled, his body heaving with sobs of exquisite pain.

Walter leant in and wrapped his arms around Peter's shoulders, tipping his son's head into his shoulder, whispering comfort into his ear. The raging storm of activity from the front seemed to fade, leaving only the glassy whine of the Rift. It was just the two of them. Peter wept.

xXXXXXx

All too soon they were interrupted, by a sound so dreadful and portentous that even Peter's grief evaporated for a moment. What Olivia had heard as a blaring brass-instrument discordance, Peter heard as the interference that came when a microphone is placed too close to its speaker, amplified to an strident roar that made his eyes hurt, his _teeth _hurt.

He felt his father's arms unweave from his neck, and the old man's expression when his face reappeared drove a spear of terror into his chest: resignation. It was time, and there was so much left to say…

Walter backed away slightly, seizing his son's face again, but this time much tighter, as if the grip could push his words deeper, drive them home. His eyes were fierce with determination. His demeanour was now that of a man who was very close to being late for a very important meeting. He spoke hurriedly.

"Peter, listen to me. The last six years we've had together have made me whole. If I had to do it all over again, I would do it without hesitation. It would be worth it. _You_ were worth it. I hope, in time, you'll finally forgive me."

He leant in and placed a lingering kiss on the side of Peter's head, above his ear, then connected their foreheads again. With heartbreaking sorrow, he spoke his last words with infinite softness:

"I love you, son."

That last word reached right into Peter's chest and squeezed his heart. His awareness fading very rapidly now, he made one last, gargantuan effort to speak, to scream _I DO forgive you!_ _I love you, too! _All that came out was a barely-human croak, but he loaded it with all the love and forgiveness he could muster:

"_Dad…_"

It was all Walter needed. He froze, half-risen, his sorrow disappearing instantaneously, eyes closing in an expression of sunny, contented joy. In that moment he looked twenty, _thirty_ years younger: he knew he had been forgiven. He smiled, and turned to face his end.

xXXXXXx

Peter was barely aware of anything now, the world having blurred and dimmed into a roaring, incomprehensible semi-dream, but he clearly saw his father straighten himself, square himself, and walk with defiant dignity into the beckoning arms of the Machine. A brick landed on each eyelid, and they tried to close, but he drew on the last of his reserves to keep them open. He glimpsed a blackish X shape forming in the centre of the podium. Heaving the dregs of his remaining consciousness to the surface, he channeled all of it into one last, beseeching roar:

"_DAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAD!_"

There was a brief, pregnant pause, and then it began.

xXXXXXx

The light came first – a blazing, purple-white ball of fury that surrounded the Machine and its occupant. Peter allowed his eyes to close against it, but the light sliced through his eyelids with imperious contempt, turning them to glass; he could see that small, dark, wavering X in the core of that hell storm whether he wanted to or not. He also became aware of a sound. It was, at first, more felt than heard, but its volume multiplied with ferocious speed.

He would have great difficulty describing that sound to Olivia as they on the bench, days later; it was a sound so hideously _alien_ it had no business being heard by human ears. He would cast around for analogs, eventually arriving at a combination of the pure, continuous hearing-test tone of a high-C tuning fork, and a cycling electronic humming/grind he could only equate to a lightsaber, being swung in an ever faster circle. She had smiled at that comparison.

His tear-stained face lit with that eldritch glow, he saw his right arm rise of its own accord, carrying a hand that felt as heavy as a car battery, and reach out across the ten yard/ten mile gap that separated him from his dad. His fingers formed into a grasping claw, desperate to touch the man one last time. He overbalanced, falling onto his knees, that arm still straining, wanting to tear loose from its shoulder. Sweat sprang out on his forehead in beads the size of air gun pellets. He was weeping and sobbing and moaning in total misery, his face half-buried in snow, but his eyes still nailed to that tiny X in the middle of the conflagration. Incredibly, he began to crawl.

xXXXXXx

Both the light and the sound were swelling, _billowing_ beyond Peter's capacity to bear. His field of vision was collapsing from the outside in, black stars blooming at its edges. Sounds became muted and choppy. He had a brief moment to worry that he would die anyway – the Machine's byproducts having seared his eyeballs, imploded his ear drums and turned his brain to mush – before he passed into senseless oblivion, his body slumping face-first to the ground.


	5. Theories

Olivia was mildly surprised to find Peter's arm around her shoulders. She could not recall moving into that position; she had been utterly and completely spellbound, as if she had been right beside the two men as they shared their last moment together. She was shocked to see a milky scarlet tinge to the horizon – the sun was on its way up which, in early December, meant it was past eight already. More than three hours had disappeared. She raised her free hand to her face, only confirming what she already knew: her eyes had become fire hoses, and her cheeks were slick with tears. She opened her mouth, but discovered she had nothing to say, so she closed it again.

The love the man had had for his son… even hearing it second hand she had felt her heart swell until it threatened to explode. She considered her own feelings for Peter to be so large and yet undefined that she was slightly _afraid_ of them, like some glorious ultimate Christmas present whose shape had been cleverly obscured by clever wrapping, but this… it was like comparing the moon to the sun. No wonder he had been reluctant to reveal this – she was broken almost in half and she hadn't even _been_ there. She, like everybody else, had been so used to the Walter Bishop who got lost on his way down the block, who drove like a ten-year-old who'd sneaked his parents' car keys, who could barely tie his own _shoes_, that to hear about this incredible and unsuspected depth of character filled her with both amazement and sorrow: she had never known, and now _would_ never know, this Walter.

She lifted her head from Peter's shoulder and chanced a look at him. His eyes were unfocused, and a fond half-smile of remembrance lit his face. He had been through this three times now, twice this very evening, and apparently the third time didn't carry that same crushing, piercing anguish. Olivia, however, felt several very large and very insistent emotions battling for priority.

There was guilt – bright, pulsing guilt. In her anger at his seeming abandonment of Peter she had all but called Walter a coward. She could not recall, before that hectoring tirade she had poured onto him at Peter's bedside, a single instance of ever actually being _angry_ with the old man. Annoyed? Yes. Exasperated? Most definitely. But at his core, she had felt, Walter Bishop was harmless. Until that Tuesday night.

His evasive, whimpering "I can't _stay_, Olivia… I have… things to do..." had not only touched a nerve, it had hacked through flesh to get to it. Although she had refused to accept it in any conscious way, she had, deep (_deep_) down, admitted to herself the possibility that Peter was doomed, and _Walter's_ acceptance had made her face her _own_. The encounter with September was, she thought, the tipping point; it had certainly brought Walter's frantic experiments to a very sudden halt. She had expected her own mounting rage at the injustice to be universal, and was confounded that it hadn't been. Astrid's constant tears she could forgive – she was very good at making you forget just how young she was - but between Broyles' impenetrable stoicism and Peter's own apparent… _capitulation _(there was no other word for it), she had found herself wondering if she was the only one who cared what was happening.

She then felt a wave of scorching regret as the truth washed over her: far from abandoning Peter, Walter had not only sacrificed what could have been his last days with him to find a solution, he had succeeded, at the cost of his own _life_, and he had kept it from _everyone_. Given his already fragile mind _and_ his hysterical grief, she found herself thunderstruck. Where, in God's name, had he found the _strength_ for that?

"Peter… I can't stand the fact that he might have died hating me. I was just so… _angry_ with him! If I'd have _known_…"

It escaped from her mouth before she could rein it in, and she felt appalled at how selfish it sounded, but he cupped her cheek in his left hand, a gesture that still took her breath away, and thumbed a fresh tear way. Incredibly, he was smiling - an unequivocal "don't be ridiculous" smile.

"Liv… if you could have seen his face when he said your name…" He was shaking his head slightly, the smile widening. "You know in his mind we'd already been married twenty years. You were basically his daughter. The only thing that could have sent him off happier was if _you'd_ called him "dad"."

Totally unexpectedly, she _laughed_. A thick, watery laugh, but a laugh nonetheless. Peter folded his arm back around her shoulders, kissed the top of her head, and continued to chuckle.

xXXXXXx

A while later, the sky now completely awash with a watercolour orange-red, Olivia decided to ask her questions. Peter's total, unfeigned surprise at his father's appearance at the eleventh hour had meant that he, also, had not known about those clandestine goings-on, but she thought that if anybody would have a theory about just _how_ the old man had wrought this miracle, it would be Peter. He took very much after Walter in that department.

Without preamble, she broke away from him and dove in.

"Peter, you said the Machine's power supply was locked to _your _genetic code, and that you couldn't change it. How do you think Walter did it? And in any case, you also said your glimmer would power it – how could _he_ have done it if he didn't have one?"

She was very pleased to see him adopt a thoughtful, ruminating expression. He _did_ have theories.

"OK, I'll start at the beginning. These are just theories, but they're as good as any. Just know, there's no warranties.

"The glimmer, as _you_ named it, isn't energy as such, but it's an _indicator_ of energy. When an object crosses the boundary it's… charged, lets say, and keeps the charge as long as it's not in its home universe and the door stays open. What I think is that both the crossing over _and_ the stay in the other universe lead to an instability in the atomic structure of the object in question. If somebody crosses and then goes back immediately, the effect is too small to be a problem, or even to be noticed, probably. The damage also seems to correct itself over time.

"However, if something crosses over and over again, like William Bell, or crosses and then stays in the wrong universe for a long time, like _me_, the effect builds up, and the object or person grows more and more unstable. If an object is _forcibly _brought over, without your gnarly powers or by an unstable doorway, the charge is so intense that it basically turns the thing into a mini A-bomb."

She recalled Brandon making a coffee cup appear on a little plinth at Massive Dynamic four years ago - it had gone off like an M-80 at the slightest touch. She knew that was were Bell had gone, and where Peter had been heading. _You're holding up better than I expected…_

"OK," she said, "so the Machine would have "split the atom" and used your unstable energy to power itself. I follow that. But how was _Walter_ able to power it? He only crossed over about half a dozen times. Fewer than _me, _in fact. There's no way his atoms would have been unstable enough to do it."

Peter's face changed here, into a dreamy middle-distance slackness that told her he was about to go off the beaten track and into hare-brained speculation. He stroked his chin.

"Again, I have a theory, but I'm almost certain it's right. It's the only thing I can think of that fits. But first ask yourself: where _was_ dad for that last week?"

That was, indeed, a very good question. Despite having, via Broyles, the might of both the entire FBI and those associated peripherally with Fringe Division, Walter Bishop had for all intents and purposes dropped off the face of the Earth. She had had an idea that he had, incredible and suicidal as it had seemed, crossed over for some reason.

"We couldn't find him, and not for lack of trying either."

"Sorry; I should have been clearer: w_hat_ was he doing for that last week?"

Olivia felt a ripple of annoyance – why was he playing with her? Noting her expression, Peter give her a nudge.

"Remember, repeated crossings cause the same instability that affected me."

That prod was all it took: the answer fell into her mind with an almost audible _CLICK_. _That's why he didn't tell me himself – he wanted to see if I'd draw the same conclusion_. And the conclusion she had drawn was so vivid, so perfect, that it arrived with its own _tableau vivant_:

She saw Walter, standing between two corrugated sheets of metal splayed into a V: a doorway like the one he had built to go over and get Peter that first time. In the middle of the doorway Walter's form was flickering, wavering, disappearing and reappearing dozens of times a second, like a projected movie running at half speed; she could see through to the wall behind him. He was crossing over and back as fast as the doorway would let him.

She opened her mouth to relate this epiphany to Peter, but he merely smiled and nodded, cutting her off.

"It would have been like running around in a revolving door without ever getting out."

Olivia was stunned. "He must have been at it for hours… _days_." _I have... things to do_. Another wisp of guilt.

"Yeah. Remember, I'd been here for almost thirtyyears coming apart at the seams; he had to get there in six _days_. I doubt he got out of that thing unless it was to eat or go to the bathroom, and I'm not sure about the second one."

That was one question answered. Like Peter had said, it was all theoretical, but she, like he, was certain that was what had happened. Peter then surprised her by asking a question of his own:

"How did he do it, though? He had William Bell remove all his memories of building the first one…"

Olivia had not even considered that, and found she had nothing to contribute; the fact that Peter had asked her meant he had no idea either.

Another question arose, however, one she hadn't even thought of asking until now. Guilt forced it out of her.

"Peter… why didn't he _tell_ anyone?"

What she had meant, she and Peter both knew, was _why didn't he tell _me_? _All that anger and pain and misery could have been avoided. That awful altercation over Peter's bed…

Peter looked thoughtful, obviously trying and rejecting possible answers, but finally conceded.

"I don't know. I'll admit I'm wondering why he didn't tell me either, now. But I do know he had a reason, and that it must have been a doosie. He wouldn't have wanted to hurt you any more than he would me."

She accepted the lack of closure for the time being, but knew at the back of her mind she would be chewing on it for a long time to come. Putting it aside for now, she addressed the latter half of the more immediate mystery.

"OK, let's take the revolving door theory as read. How did he get the power supply to work for him?"

His face screwed up again in that frown of puzzlement. She suspected he had dealt with the revolving door in fairly short order, and had been twisting and turning this last riddle in that vast brain of his probably ever since he had first woken up in hospital. He took a considered breath, and then that frown dissolved, replaced by a rueful smile. He shook his head in defeat.

"Liv, I've been going at _that _one basically day and night since we got home, and I'm about ready to write it off. I took the thing down to its wires when the Secretary gave it to me four years ago. As far as I could tell there was simply no way to adjust it, as if the _need_ hadn't even been considered. Symbiosis with my DNA was woven into it, like threads in fabric. Imagine… a radio, with no tuning knob, that can only receive one station."

Another of his oh-so-helpful similes. She had seen Walter rip the thing to pieces to try and reconfigure it in their lab, in the end resembling no more than a monkey trying to smash a nut open with a rock, and _his_ attempted explanation of how the thing had worked had been total gobbledygook. She had given up hope of ever understanding it.

Mildly confounded at this _second_ unanswered question, she remained silent. She had kept her last question close to her chest for a while, and delivered it as casually as she could, but her heart picked up speed nonetheless:

"So, what about _your _instability? Is it gone for good?"

His brief silence seemed to last an hour, but eventually his answer came.

"Yes, that's one of the few things I _am_ sure of. The "chronic" type instability is only present in response to a pathway back to the original universe. In my case, all those thin spots had been acting like little magnets, and when the Rift flared up properly it was almost literally a vacuum cleaner. When the Rift closed, and all those thin spots disappeared, the instability faded and I could recover. Pretty quickly, too, it turned out."

That was an understatement: he had woken up in hospital a mere five hours later with the greeting that would live in her memory for the rest of her life – _OK, how long _this _time? –_withmost of his vitals miraculously plummeting back to something resembling normalcy. The next day they had been home, with orders that he consume at least four thousand calories a day for one week to bolster his ravaged metabolism. _Plenty of simple sugars_, his doctor had said, still dazed at how fast he had gone from a sweaty, delirious coma to this goofball who could sustain a game of chess with bald black man who had come to visit. Peter, being Peter, had taken this as licence to eat like a five-year-old, and was gleeful when his doctor had replied

"Basically, yes, but within reason…"

Eager for him to recover that borderline-chubbiness she so dearly loved, she had fed him as many donuts as he could keep down, having been told by his doctor that they were an ideal base. They had been very difficult to find, most stores having been picked clean thanks to the power cuts, but being placed in indefinite leave had left little else to do, so they had enjoyed a circuitous, leisurely drive. Peter had insisted on having the car's air conditioning on because of his high temperature, and she had demanded his peacoat in compensation. He had told her she could have it until he got big enough to fill it properly again – he had lost twenty-odd pounds. She half hoped he never would – she loved its smell.

xXXXXXx

Despite his having explained almost everything that had happened that night, his face had returned to that pondering frown.

"What?" she asked, gently.

He hesitated. "This is gonna make me sound like a raging egomaniac, but something's been bothering me, beyond the nuts and bolts, that is."

"What is it?"

"Well… ever since the game really got into its stride and it looked like I was going to end up being a spark plug, that September guy kept cropping up more and more. He was talking to dad pretty much every day by the end."

She felt a swoop of something that tasted like revulsion. Oh, she had had enough of those guys…

"Dad never told me what they talked about, but he'd say "my friend says you're very important", or something like that. Now, if an Observer was saying _I_ was important…"

She had no idea where he was going, so she let him finish.

"What I suppose I'm trying to say is, when I climbed into that thing and put my hand on the button, I thought it was my chance to do something right, something I was _supposed _to do. I _felt _important for once. And when it didn't work I felt... I dunno… _cheated_, somehow. I know how weird that sounds. It's just a bit of a comedown to realize I'm _not_ important after all."

Olivia only just managed to keep a bark from escaping her throat, but it was very close: what he had just said was so far into ridiculous it was almost laughable. _Not important?_ After six years of knowing him, and nearly three of being effectively _married_ to him, she was still stunned by his inability to see himself as others saw him. As _she_ saw him. For a genius he had some very surprising blind spots, and it was something she found by turns endearing and infuriating.

All she had to do was picture herself as that snarling, heedless animal standing in front of the Other Side's last hurrah, stamping out the Other Side troops like ants as they poured through that hateful glaring eye; looking up and seeing things flying through the air that should never leave the ground… all in his name. That pathetic, groveling relief she had felt when those two and a half words had come through Broyles' radio – _Uhhh… Bishop's ALIVE!_

His own father had broken the shackles of his half-sanity and thrown himself into the fire to save him, for God's sake, and if _that_ didn't make him important…

She sat on her argument; he'd never believe her anyway. She still managed a sarcastic shake of the head, though, and made sure he saw it. He gathered her back into his arms.

xXXXXXx

She had begun to doze again, Peter's soporific force field pleasantly fuzzing her, when a very loud, very sudden noise from the kitchen slapped her awake; Peter almost jumped out of his socks. He stood and turned to look through the window, cupping his hands against the morning glare to peer in. It was an insistent, grinding buzz, and she was at a loss to identify it. The sun was peeking over the horizon now, and she could here the telltale swooshing whispers of cars on the road. _Another hour gone…_

"Faaantastic." As only he could deliver it. She sensed amusement.

"What _is_ it?"

He answered with a rising chuckle, leaning slowly away from the glass.

"The blender. Dad must have left it on the last time he was here."

The chuckle rose and rose, and became an outright belly laugh. Olivia couldn't help but join in. It was so musical, like a kitten running up a piano's keyboard. It reminded her of Walter's laugh.

He went inside, still laughing, and turned the offending gadget off before trying a light switch. A yellowish glow poured through the window, then went out. He came back outside and stood in the doorframe, wearing that smile that only seemed to affect half his face. She was suddenly overcome by the certainty that, though there would be more dips into grief still to come, he had turned a corner. She was glad.

"It would seem the power's back on. That's a shame – I was looking forward to going looting tomorrow…"

"Uh… I think there would be a conflict of interest there, Mr Bishop."

"Oh?"

"I _am_ a federal agent, in case you've forgotten."

"Ah… correction: a federal agent on _indefinite leave_."

She was working very hard indeed to stop a goofy smile from climbing onto her face: she was _relishing _this.

She rose, picked up her empty whisky glass and his coin, and followed him into the house. She tipped the glass up over her mouth, making sure every last drop of Broyles' uber whisky had been extracted – it really was exquisite - and put the glass upside down in the sink.

"We should go shopping tomorrow… _today_," he corrected himself, on his way to the stairs, "from memory, we have precisely an onion and a jar of horseradish in the fridge, and we're running low on Astrid-pies."

"You mean, _you're_ running low on Astrid-pies. _I've_ yet to see one, thank you."

They climbed the stairs, still jousting.

xXXXXXx

It was just before ten, and they had returned to bed, Olivia having extracted a promise that Peter would _stay_ there this time. Their robes, not needed now, were on their adjacent hooks on the back of the door. As he was undressing she had seen the faint ghost of a pinprick in the middle of his chest. She had kissed it, thanking Walter in her own way.

He was at now her back, coiled around her to keep her warm, both facing the window. The snow had abated somewhat, but was still falling merrily. Ella would have a snow day tomorrow; Olivia made a point to invite her over. A day of snowmen and snowball fights would go down _very_ well, she thought…

She was about to slide into oblivion when something occurred to her.

"Peter?"

"Go to sleep," was his mock-threatening growled reply, muffled by her hair. She tried to turn her head to look at him, but he was holding her too tightly. She managed to get halfway around, looking at the ceiling.

"There's a question I forgot to ask."

A considering silence, then, resignedly,

"Go on…"

"You said you passed out before the Machine went up, and you were still inside the bubble."

Something that could have been _mmhmm_.

"So… how did you get _out_?"

That brought him around. Partly. He loosened his hold and she completed her turn, looking into his bleary eyes. He tried to focus, looking comically confused. He propped himself up on his right elbow.

"Don't _you_ know?"

"Nope. First I heard of it was a call over the radio that the hazmat team had found you lying right where Broyles had left you. Wearing a V-neck cardigan."

He continued to frown for a moment, and then did the last thing she was expecting: he shrugged, his frown evaporating and being replaced by pure nonchalance.

"_Deus ex machina_. We'll probably never know." He lay back down.

She couldn't believe this: Peter Bishop, the smartass who had an answer for almost everything and _demanded_ answers for everything else, was letting this _go_? _Three_ unsolvables in one night. She was losing her touch. A jaw-cracking yawn seized her out of nowhere, causing Peter to chuckle.

"Just go to sleep. We'll have to be up bright and early to get caught in those wonderful traffic jams and buy up all the shit left in the stores that nobody ever wanted in the first place."

She burst into laughter at this, and turned back over.

"Peter, the _sun's_ up. "Bright-and-early"'s come and gone."

A dramatic sigh/groan from behind her – _don't be a smartass_, _that's_ my_ job_.

"OK… we'll sleep through to the _next "_bright-and-early", then."

Peter reclaimed her with his arms, planting a kiss on her neck, just under her jaw. His lips came away with a hearty smack. She closed her eyes and settled down, a scarf of warm breath tickling her shoulder. She felt the ghost of a hand tucking her hair behind her ear before she drifted away.


	6. Coda: the Hub

_September took in the scene. It was not as he had envisioned it, and he felt_

(delight)

_in the discrepancies – being wrong was a rare and wonderful thing for him; his near omniscience carried the heavy penalty of an almost stupefying boredom. He was also strangely_

(smug)

_in knowing that _he _had helped events jump to this alternative track. Even given the Arbiters' incomprehensible power and knowledge, he had gone in under their radar and snatched this victory from their grasping claws. He had played their game, a game that had spanned all of recorded time and whose stakes amounted to an entire universe, and won._

_The boy was lying face down, unconscious and very near death, his arm outstretched in an obvious attempt to touch his father one last time. Tears had frozen on his face. He was barely breathing. But he was alive. September crouched to look at him more closely, marveling at how similar and yet dissimilar he was to the little boy he had saved all those years ago._

_His orders, issued with that usual__ heedlessness__ that dispelled any notion of dissent, recurred to him:_

**THE BOY IS IMPORTANT**

**BISHOP MUST DIE IF THE BALANCE IS TO BE RESTORED**

_September had heard the first many times, and had parroted in many, many more, but only now, at the end, had it become such a colossal understatement. He knew now, as did his brothers, that he was the most important human being they had encountered to date._

_Peter Bishop had been nothing less than the core, the axis, the hub around which all else had turned. Without him this whole wheel of purpose would never have taken shape in the first place. However, since the hub does not move, its critical significance is always overlooked by the rest of the wheel. Indeed, in this case the hub could not even comprehend his _own_ significance, but that had not negated it._

_He had not only activated, amplified and focused the Woman's powers, but he had also inspired his father's willing sacrifice. Both had been crucial to the restoration of balance. Now that September thought about it, the Boy's reach had even transcended his own Linear limitations, for he had drawn an Observer into their plight, if even unknowingly._

_The second mandate had given him pause, and a gnawing_

(sadness)

(regret)

_After having saved the Boy and watched him ever since, he had felt the vague stirrings of attachment begin to form. Even as the sprawling intaglio of possible-future strands had begun to thin out, as if being pruned, he had held out_

(hope)

_that the Boy would somehow survive the coming storm. His brothers could not understand his preoccupation, and he knew they had considered him merely an August _in potentia_. He had somewhat welcomed the comparison – at least August had done _something_, had not stood by and watched like these others and treated the Linears like puppets. However, August had gone too far, abandoned his post, courted disaster. September had been more subtle, finding ways to… reinterpret his orders, to stay within the rules. He knew he was sailing close to the wind by leaving the drawing with the Woman, but the hammer of reprisal had not fallen; the Arbiters must have approved (or at least had not _dis_approved) of his actions, or else had decided that their intended future was immune to his meddling._

_However, when that braid of possible futures had been whittled down to just two shining, parallel threads, he had finally been left with the choice: to stand back and allow the future to take its course, or to go the way of August and explicitly intervene, destroy one thread and preserve the other. The urge to try to save the Boy was almost overwhelming but he, unlike August, was able to control it, use it to his advantage. He had re-examined that last order; it had whirled through his consciousness in an endless loop, like a snake eating its tail…_

**BISHOP MUST DIE IF THE BALANCE IS TO BE RESTORED**

_There had seemed to be no way around it – the Arbiters were very rarely this explicit. It had followed him everywhere, invading his every thought. That extra, redundant future-thread had almost taunted him – _what was it _for?_

**BISHOP MUST DIE**

**BISHOP MUST DIE**

**BISHOP MUST D**

_And all at once it came to him, every beautiful facet of the solution springing into being simultaneously:_

"_Bishop" must die. _Bishop_. Not "the Boy", not "Peter". _Bishop_._

_Those two shining cores of possibility seemed to burn right in front of his eyes, and he realized, with a seismic jolt, that he _could_ save the Boy, but at great risk and enormous cost. August would have decided to act there and then, but September stepped back, probing the implications._

_He knew he could not force the issue by ordering or manipulating the Father into taking his son's place, not without the Arbiters summarily dismissing him from the game. Nor did he feel he had any right to do so. He would have to find some way to… present the opportunity, and hope the Father would know how to take advantage of it. The Father had done something similar before, but his memory of it was very badly damaged; September accepted that he might have to help him remember. He had wondered whether or not the Father would even be willing to make the exchange, but that consideration had been very brief indeed – of course he would. He lived for the Boy. He would not think twice._

_He found himself comparing this world's Walter Bishop to the other one and was astounded at how much they had diverged. Both had experienced exactly the same loss, yet one had become a broken, half-insane wreck who had in the end been willing to give his life for his son, while the other had become a scheming genocidal maniac who had been ready to do the exact opposite, willing to throw that same son into the fire merely to punish his kidnappers and preserve himself. He had to keep reminding himself that these people merely_ looked_ alike…_

_He had then turned his attention to the latter part of the plan, and found it troubled him far more than the first. It had seemed… manipulative, cynical. The way the Arbiters thought, in other words. It went against his every fibre. However, he was certain it would work, and he had believed it to be absolutely necessary. The prospect of the Woman's inevitable pain unsettled him, though._

_Thus, he had gone to the Father's laboratory, finding him and the Woman in the midst of their increasingly frantic efforts to save his son. The two of them there, without the Boy. There would be no better time._

"_Bishop must die – we can see no other resolution."_

_He put as much emphasis as he dared on that first word, wringing every ounce of ambiguity out of it he possibly could. He had felt no guilt – he was merely relaying his orders to them as they had been relayed to him – but he had felt a giddy thrill of_

(rebellion)

_as the Father had taken his meaning and manufactured a very convincing (to the Woman, at least) display of grief. The Woman, though… she had reacted very differently, exactly as he had hoped she would, in fact, but the weapon in his face had come utterly out of left field. Very few times had he seen a Linear so _angry_, so intent on vengeance. He had involuntarily stepped away from her, one of the few times he had been truly unsure of what would happen next, but the Father had spoken up:_

"_Olivia… please don't. He's my friend, and it wouldn't do any good now."_

_September had realized that the Father had fully comprehended him; he knew he would need September to carry out the crucial first step of the plan – that theatrical glance at the power supply suggested nothing less - and had just saved his life; the Woman _had_ been fully prepared to kill him. He had felt no relief at having been spared, however, only an ambivalent_

(satisfaction)

_at having seen the second part of his plan succeed. It had been known for a long time that the Woman's powers depended on emotion – fear, anger, love. What better way to engender all three than to let her believe that the Boy was going to die? _

_They had been brought together in a purely facilitative way - it had been necessary to alert them to the Pattern and the danger they faced. However, out of that dutiful juxtaposition had arisen something that not even the Arbiters had been able to foresee and could still barely comprehend: love. Or, rather, Love. It had swelled and billowed until they were no more or less than two halves of a whole. Seeing them with each other, talking, laughing, kissing, had compounded that_

(helplessness)

_he had felt as he saw the Boy draw ever closer to his prescribed doom. The Woman, he had known, would hurt beyond all reason until the Zero Point, but if all went as planned she would not be hurting afterward, and possibly never would again. Not in that way. The hurt would, when the time came, energize her and help her reach her final, awesome potential. In light of the Secretary's imminent arrival with overwhelming advantage in both manpower and technology, there was no other way to rebuff them._

_He had sworn the Father to secrecy before they went any further. The Father had been desperate to tell the Woman, knowing she would tell the Boy immediately, but September's involvement in this could not go beyond the two of them, and it was critical that the Woman be left to mire in her grief. Securing the old man's promise, September had taken him away to somewhere he could work in peace, (re)supplied him with instructions for his Doorway, and had then finally burnt the bridge he had crossed with that drawing: he had changed the Unmaker's power supply to recognize the Father's genetic code. _

_In no way could he convince himself that this did not constitute outright abuse of his position: symbiosis with the Boy's DNA had been built into the very essence of the thing, and it could not be "adjusted" by any means that any Linear could begin to comprehend. The Father and the Boy had both tried, separately, for days to do it. September would never be able to claim that he had been merely expediting a Linear's existing efforts (as he had done with the Father's Doorway). He was also aware that he had been extremely, _profligately_ lucky that the Linears had found a way to reprogram the Unmaker to repair the Anomaly rather than turn it upon their enemies. The power supply, though… it was simply beyond them, and always would be._

_Even while he held the thing in his hands he had felt as though his superiors' wrath would finally come down on him, that they had finally tired of this loose cannon, but it had not. It had occurred to him then that, though the Arbiters were dispassionate, they were not precisely _cruel_. He had hoped, and half-believed, that they simply wanted a life if the balance was to be restored. Well, they would _get_ a life – but a _willing_ one._

_xXXXXXx_

_He rose away from the boy and looked to the centre of the Anomaly. His brothers were here, having shepherded the Secretary's people back into their own universe before they sealed his Doorway forever. After tonight there could be no more crossings._

_The ten were arranged in a circle at the base of the Unmaker, gazing upward at the Father with identical expressions of_

(anticipation)

(fascination)

(wonderment)

_September could empathize: this was the moment for which they had been waiting and planning for… was it years? Decades? Millennia? _Eons?_ He couldn't be sure; his perception of time had degraded badly since his recruitment. The significance of this Event was not at all lost on him, though. _

_He walked around to the front of the Unmaker, where his brothers had left a space for him. Incredibly, they had removed their hats; they were being held loosely at their sides. September felt a ripple of_

(annoyance):

_they had chastised him for his propensities toward the Linears, and yet here they were indulging in one of their rituals. Hypocrites. However, he removed his own hat._

_He looked up into the old man's face, and saw something that both_

(shocked)

_and_

(overjoyed)

_him. It was the very definition of blissful, soaring contentment. It was the face of a man who had just sat down to rest after having had the best day of his life. No, more than that: it was the face of a man who had at last finished repaying some enormous debt (which, in a way, he had). His face was turned upward, as if he believed were about to meet God Himself. His eyes were issuing blinding beams of searing white light into the Unmaker's core. The moment, September knew, was very close._

_He turned back to the Boy, remembering his promise to the Father. He bent, and gently picked him up, - he was appallingly light - draping him over his shoulder. He took one last look at the Father, at that heavenly, transported expression, and saw his brothers all looking at him with identical expressions: grudging respect._

_He turned, carrying the Boy out of the Anomaly. Out of danger._

_xXXXXXx_

_He moved very quickly, but lightly, stepping with unnatural surefootedness, making sure he was not seen. He followed the trail of footprints that led to the Anomaly, knowing it was the way the Boy had come; he left no footprints of his own. He spotted a slight rise in the terrain and deemed it a suitably safe place behind which to place his charge. He climbed it, hearing the Unmaker powering up. It was time._

_Setting the Boy down, September half rose, intending to rejoin his brothers, but he lingered. Not knowing quite what he was about to do, or why, he reached down to the Boy's face and touched it gently, with the back of his fingers. Here he was, alive, safe. That single remaining thread of future shone in September's mind._

"_Peter," he said, quietly. _

_He knew he was tempting fate. It was absolutely vital that none of the Linears saw him, or this could all have been for nothing. If the Boy had somehow woken up and clocked him, an Observer with his hand right in the Linear cookie jar, September was as good as finished, and his bargain with the Father would come under a very bright spotlight with the people upstairs. But it was the first time he had met Peter since he had been pulled from that water, and the notion of parting from him forever without some kind of contact was unthinkable. He smiled, the first unaffected one in the ancient creature's memory. The Boy's eyelids fluttered, but that was all. _

_September wondered how long it would take the Boy to recover from this – his degradation had not just affected him bodily, but had all but crushed his spirit, taken his will to live. Remembering the gun in his face, however, he knew that the Woman would be all he would need. He tried to see forward, into their future, and found that he couldn't; apparently this night's events would be so momentous that his gift and curse of foresight had been rendered useless – all bets were off. He was_

(glad)_;_

_it had become so tiresome of late. September nodded thanks to the boy._

_With that, he rose, turned, and headed back into the Anomaly._


End file.
